From Resurrection Mary and Al Capone to the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln, the spine-tingling sights and sounds of Chicago's yesteryear are still with us-- and so are its ghosts. Selzer pieces together the truth behind Chicago's ghosts, and brings to light dozens of never-before-told firsthand accounts. Take a historical tour of the famous and not-so-famous haunts around town. Sometimes the real story is far different from the urban legend ... and most of the time it's even gorier ...
“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
Features a collection of stories that tell of everyday people who must confront their own private ghosts - an accountant who falls in love with a woman who is in love with a man on death row, and a boy whose fascination with movie monsters grows stronger as his mother's pregnancy comes to term.
"At the close of the nineteenth century, Chicago offered the world a glimpse of humanity's most breathtaking possibilities and its most jaw-dropping horrors. Even as the White City emerged from the ashes of the Great Fire, serial killers like H.H. Holmes stalked the sparkling new boulevards and tragic accidents plagued the factories, slums and railroads that powered the churn of industrial innovation. Demons, mesmerists and birds of ill omen preyed on the unwary from the shadows. Ship captains spoke to the dead, while undertakers discovered reanimated corpses no longer requiring services. From posh mansions built on massacre grounds to the drowned quarries of a forest preserve, Ursula Bielski follows the dark undercurrents beneath the electric lights of the World's Fair."--
From Chicago historian Adam Selzer, expert on all of the Windy City’s quirks and oddities, comes a compelling heavily researched anthology of the stories behind its most fascinating unsolved mysteries. To create this unique volume, Selzer has collected forty unsolved mysteries from the 1800s to modern day. He has poured through all newspaper, magazine, and book references to them, and consulted expert historians. Topics covered include who really started the great Chicago fire, who was the first “automobile murderer,” and even if there was actually a vampire slaying at Rose Hill cemetery. The result is both a colorful read to get lost in, a window to a world of curiosity and wonder, as well as a volume that separates fact from fiction—true crime from urban legend. Complementing the gripping stories Selzer presents are original images of the crime and its suspects as developed by its original investigators. Readers will marvel at how each character and crime were presented, and happily journey with Selzer as he presents all facts and theories presented at the time of the “crime” and uses modern hindsight to assemble the pieces.
In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.
Chicago is full of ghosts, mysterious deaths, murders, and tragic events. Visit over eighty macabre Chicagoland locations you'd never want to visit after dark. The most famous Chicago ghost stories, including ""Resurrection Mary"" and ""Bachelor's Grove,"" are featured along with some lesser-known tales such as ""The Sunnybrook Asylum"" and ""The Gate.
"Father Leo then paused with a deep breath before going on. 'There are many problems here, and some very strange things happen late at night that I just can't explain.' "Poverty. Crime. Politics. Scandal. Revenge. . . . And a Ghost.These are the untold stories of the last days of a forgotten Chicago parish by the last person able to tell them: Fresh out of the seminary in 1956, Father Rocco Facchini was appointed to his first assignment, the parish of Saint Charles Borromeo on the city's Near West Side. Adapting to rectory life with an unorthodox, dispirited pastor and attending to the needs of the rough, impoverished neighborhood were challenges in themselves. Little did Rocco know that the rectory was being haunted by a bishop's ghost!Muldoon: A True Chicago Ghost Story dives into Father Rocco's four-year saga at Saint Charles, where his spiritual undertaking becomes a worldly adventure. His supporting cast includes a housekeeper inappropriately involved in her pastor's affairs, and a genius-priest who carries a gun, thwarts neighborhood crime, and teaches Rocco about "loving the poor." And there's the pastor himself. He padlocks the refrigerator, guides young priests only in the weekly ritual of Bingo, and entangles Rocco in the dirty work of a fraudulent shrine.As a backdrop to this chaos, the rectory experiences a host of supernatural manifestations, and Rocco discovers the legend of Bishop Peter J. Muldoon. Are there clues in this story of early stardom and great achievement, clerical competition and revenge, accusations and scandal, a missing ring, excommunication, and possibly murder that explain why the unexplainable is happening all around him?Upon delving into the church history, clerical politics, local folklore, neighborhood sociology, and paranormal activity of Muldoon, you, like Rocco, may be left wondering: Has he been kept alive to tell the story of Muldoon, clear the man's name, and memorialize the bishop's beloved and forgotten parish of St. Charles?
The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction. As Mark V. Barrow reveals in Nature’s Ghosts, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson’s day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane. A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature’s Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.
